German, Italian, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Black, Mexican, Mormon, Catholic, Protestant, American, Immigrant... those are tribes. And we gravitate toward ones of own tribe to START with, then listen to the character of each individual.

Tribalism exists even in the haughtiest blue-bloods. Why was it such a big deal when the first Catholic was elected President? Because he was a member of a new tribe to serve as President. Why was it such a big deal when the first Black was on the Supreme Court? Because he was member of a new tribe to serve on the court.

I think its too simplistic to see it ethno-racial terms. For example, a white auto worker could give a flying you know what if the candidate who voted for the bailout was not white and the one against it was white. He's going with the guy who helped him put food on the table and the election proved that. Romney was born in Michigan, his dad was a popular governor there. His mom ran for Senate there. By all rights, he should have easily carried that state. It was never in play. Michigan remembered it was Obama who saved them.

Unions have a lot of Irish and Italians in the northeast and inter culturally have not gotten along with Blacks but will vote for Obama because he's seen as pro union than Romney.

I think Sirius Black makes a good point. Politics generally trumps race. I am willing to bet that a liberal black person would choose Hillary Clinton over Herman Cain and I am willing to bet that a conservative white person would choose Herman Cain over Joe Biden.

But, given a choice of a moderate Barrach Obama and everything gets muddled. Is he black or white? Is he liberal or conservative? What is someone to do?

Warren is one of a very small circle of experts who, during the boom years, accurately diagnosed the frailty of American finance capitalism. In scholarly articles, blog posts and several widely praised books, she has focused on the ways post-1970s wage stagnation has squeezed the middle class, leading to a drop in savings, a massive spike in consumer debt and more hours of labor spent to purchase core middle-class goods like healthcare and housing. The cumulative effect of these changes, as she argued in her talk at Berkeley, is families taking on far more risk than those of a generation earlier, and an economy skating on very thin ice.

. . .

[Warren's] COP has managed to raise a considerable ruckus. Meeting at least once a week, the panel (which includes Warren, Hensarling, former Republican Senator John Sununu, AFL-CIO associate counsel Damon Silvers and Richard Neiman, superintendent of banks for the New York State banking department) has churned out four rigorous, detailed reports.

The first asked a series of pointed questions about Treasury's strategy and the rationale for its approach. Paulson replied, but "he answered our questions by cutting and pasting from earlier speeches," Warren says. "I think he just assumed he'd mumble around, we'd mumble around and that would be the end of oversight." Instead, in the second report the COP "put together a grid that listed every question we asked, quoted his answer and called him out every time he didn't answer our specific question."

The panel's latest report created the most headlines. (It was also the first unanimous one, in which Hensarling did not dissent. His office did not return a request for an interview.) Using publicly accessible information, the COP attempted to ascertain the market value of the assets Treasury has purchased. Describing the letter Paulson originally sent to the COP, Warren said, "These 'investments,' as he called them, 'were at or near par.' That's a direct quote. That means for every $100 invested, the taxpayers get $100 back in stock and warrants. It was perfectly clear that this was not true, and it was not true not because the market fell afterwards. It was not true on the date of the transaction."

Indeed, the report found that Treasury has already overpaid by a staggering $78 billion, or almost a third of the money it had spent at the time of the report. "They described a transaction to do one thing," Warren says, "and it was designed from its inception to do something very different." She doesn't say what that "something" is, but it's clear: subsidize the banks' losses.

Unless she marches down Wall Street with a few thousand Marines she'll impact rhetoric and nothing else.

It's going to take a full on violent revolution to liberate the economy from the usurers. It will take fields of young men, organization, lots and lots and lots of violence and the support of significant portions of the military. Nothing else. The usurers have unlimited funds (literally unlimited) and own the government.

I suspect that rather than fading into obscurity and leaving the Democrats functionally unchallenged, the party platform will simply reshape itself in hopes of capturing socially-conservative hispanics.

So that gets you about 10 people.

The Republican Party will die. It deserves to die. It is the party of jerks and religious nuts. The only chance it has to live is in populism. It could focus on the economic - not cultural - issues that impact the base. It is the party of jerks and as such will not advocate high wages etc. When Democrats scream "GAY MARRIAGE" Republicans should say "wages". When Democrats scream "DIVERSITY" Republicans should say "wages. What do I care what the dudes across the hall from me call their relationship? Fox News, the WSJ, NY Post, National Review etc etc all need to be taken out to the woodshed. I don't like Obama but I'm deliriously happy that the Republicans are most likely toast.

I don't think the Republican party will die as some have pronounced on here. It will simply change. Both parties have changed over the decades. Sometimes quite opposite on some issues.
It was the Democrats, specifically the southern Democrats, called Dixie-crats that were vehementally against the Civil Rights Act. It was the Republican party that freed the slaves. The Republican party of Theodore Roosevelts day were anti corporation and pro environment. Clinton and others led a group inside the Democratic party to make it much more centrist after big losses in the '80s. They fought to make it friendlier to businesses.

Both parties will change to win. Republicans are no different. Already they are talking about immigration reform in order to get the latino vote. They will continue to field women and minority candidates to get that vote.

As polarization intensifies – which it does – the essential is expressed through the extremes, and the alternatives are simplified. Which is it to be: politics or economics? There can be no sustainable co-existence. One must utterly eradicate the other.

Either politics, or economics, deserves to be completely destroyed -- politics for its incontinent lust for absolute power, or economics for its icy indifference to public concerns. The conflict of visions is irreconcilable. From the pure perspective of terminal politics, all market rewards are arbitrary and illegitimate, whilst from that of economics, people are entitled to precisely nothing.

...

The despair of the Right is not the product of a single lamentable election result, but is grounded in the relentlessly gathering realization that it is inherently maladapted to politics. When the Right attains power, it is by becoming something other than itself, betraying its partisans not only incidentally and peripherally, through timidity or incompetence, but centrally and fundamentally, by practically advancing an agenda that almost perfectly negates its supposed ideological commitments. It builds that which it had promised to destroy, and further enthralls that which it had promised to liberate. Its victories mean ever less, its defeats ever more. To win is at most a lesser evil, whilst to lose opens new, unprecedented horizons of calamity, initiating previously unimagined adventures in horror.

...

The left has its own frustrations, which its ever-greater approximation to total political dominion cannot appease, and in fact exacerbate. The more that it subordinates its enemies to its will, the more its will conforms to the image of its enemies – not the economy as it was, evasive and morally disinterested, but the economy as it was caricatured and denounced: narrowly and brutally self-interested, sublime in its gargantuan greed, radically corrupt, and irreparably dysfunctional. The cartoon plutocrat re-appears as the consummate political insider in a shot-silk Che Guevara tee-shirt, minutely dictating the content of legislation, and pursuing a career trajectory that smoothly alternates between the chairs of regulatory agencies and Wall Street boardrooms. Through a perverse, ineliminable double-entry book-keeping, the fiscal mountains of government largesse are registered, simultaneously, as an orgiastic feast of crony capitalist money creation. Public altruism and private avarice lock into exact logico-mathematical identity.

The gyre turns. ‘Right’ administrations become sclerotic big government bureaucracies, whilst ‘Left’ administrations become the cynical public relations façade for rapacious banking cartels. In either case, government equates to treachery, executed by a party that necessarily abuses its own political partisans. Since politics is ever-increasingly the preserve of the Left, this is not an oscillator, but a ratchet, with a predictable direction (into Left Singularity, "moving the electorate ever leftwards by making it ever more dysfunctional”).

The Right, the party of the economy, is losing all credibility as a Party, especially to itself. In the war of annihilation that contemporary ideological schism has become, the substitute, characteristic battle-cry could be confidently anticipated, even were it not already so distinctly heard: the market will avenge these offenses. Nemesis. Let the temple crash.

Expect to hear much more of this, however much it revolts you.

Things will fall apart (even more, far more …), or not, but in either case we will know what we really deserve. Reality is God, but which is the true religion?

In the immortal words of HL Mencken: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

The article states:
We didn’t even need them when traveling to Canada or Mexico – at least until recently – and that change accounts for much of the sudden rise.

So, its not so much we are gettting out in the world more its post 911 requirements. I used to go to TJ in Mexico and simply walked back across, never stopped, now you need proper government id.

My parents went on a Carribean cruise each year and didn't need a passport, now they do. So it seems the regular traveling we used to do closeby (Canada, Mexico, Carribean) that didn't require a passport, is now needed.

Even with that 1/3 is a low number compared to the rest of the industrialized world and stiill supports what I thought about Americans not traveling much out in the world. Canada is just like the U.S. physically and we don't stay for long. Day trips to Mexico and a week on a cruise is what we've always done and it doesn''t give the few Americans that go on these trips any sense of what the world is like.

Unless she marches down Wall Street with a few thousand Marines she'll impact rhetoric and nothing else.

If the lady plays her cards right, she could very well be the Democratic nominee for VeeP in '16 (assuming H. Clinton doesn't run.) It's a tad bit early to be making a prediction but I'd say at this point that odds are that it will be Cuomo/Warren in '16 vs Jeb Bush/Agenda 21 Cruz of Texas...with Rand Paul/Sharon Angle (or the 'I'm not a witch chick) bringing up the far distant rear.

In a city where President Obama received more than 85 percent of the votes, in some places he received almost every one. In 13 Philadelphia wards, Obama received 99 percent of the vote or more.

Blacks *actually* support Obama the way that North Korea pretends Norks support Kim.

I think what you fail to see is that Blacks support the Democratic party in those kinds of numbers (such as 95% for Gore in '00 not because they want something.

Its purely defensive. They are afraid of having things taken away. Basic rights. Its paranoia to some extent but somewhat understandable given their history in the country.

Black middle class have as much in common with Blacks in the housing projects in the inner city as a white middle class suburbanite does with a poor white unemployed guy living in a trailer park in West Virgina or Kentucky.

Republcans have had a reputation for being anti-Black (and anti Minority such as anti Latino).

So, I would suggest that Blacks voting in that kind of percentage are voting defensively and some like the black middle and upper classes may even be voting against their self interest not because Obama or Democrats are doing things to help them but because the Republicans seem to bent on keeping them down in their minds. Again, it may not be the case but when you have some making certan rhetoric and the race baiting that happens when some use fear of Blacks and Latinos to scare up White voters then I can understand the voting pattern a little better.